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The cry of the Lord these past two years continues to be the same as the 2,000 before, “Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” By all means care for your physical body, after all it is the temple of the Lord. But do not let these physical pursuits blind your eyes from Him who is eternal and who freely gives life to all who ask, seek, and knock! Death is coming. Today then is the day to find life by believing in Jesus Christ alone for salvation. 

Then he departed from Elisha, and came to his master, who said to him, “What did Elisha say to you?” And he answered, “He told me you would surely recover.” But it happened on the next day that he took a thick cloth and dipped it in water, and spread it over his face so that he died; and Hazael reigned in his place.
II Kings 8:14-15
Earlier this week during a driving rain I drove past a Covid testing center. More than 100 people were standing outside waiting for their chance to have a Covid test. The next day I passed a drive thru testing site where cars were lined up for more than a mile. The news is full of similar stories as the world risks sickness from exposure to the elements and spends massive amounts of time for the opportunity not to be treated for Covid, but simply to find out from tests if they might have Covid. The world has trained many to consider health the most important thing in life and worthy of all sacrifice to maintain it for as long as possible.
King Ben-Hadad and his armies had killed untold numbers of people. Men, women, and children had starved under his sieges, kings had been killed in his battles. But when sickness came upon him, Ben-Hadad was so worried he sent 40 camel-loads of gifts to Elisha not as payment to be healed but as payment for the knowledge of whether or not he would survive the illness. On that note, Elisha had good news. Ben-Hadad would recover. The results of the test? The disease was not fatal! The bad news was Ben-Hadad was focused on the wrong thing. He should have been concerned for his soul and his spiritual health more than his physical health which will one day abandon us all. Ben-Hadad was going to die anyway and in a way he seemed to have least expected — his long-time servant Hazael would smother him in his own bed!
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, March 24, 2023
The difference between my protesters and those berating Judge Duncan is this: Mine had not lost sight of the fact that they and I both share a common humanity. Nor had they lost sight of the purpose of public discourse: to persuade opponents to change their views for the better, not to terrify them into silence. Why has this become such a rarity in our modern world? One argument is that we have coddled the younger generation and made them incapable of handling any views with which they disagree.

Many First Things readers are no doubt sadly aware of the disgusting treatment of federal judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School last week. Duncan was visiting campus to give a lecture sponsored by the Stanford Federalist Society. But his talk was disrupted by students who heckled him for his rulings on LGBT issues. Not only was Duncan subject to the now-traditional vile personal abuse from the pampered students who inhabit the lecture rooms of the nation’s most elite institutions, he was also treated to a lecture by the dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion (who else?) on what an evil person he is. While Stanford’s president has since apologized, it remains to be seen if the apology for allowing behavior inconsistent with the school’s policies will lead to the obvious consequence: the firing of the DEI dean for her own bizarre rant. If a senior administrator who so clearly undermines school policy is allowed to continue in office, the apology is meaningless.
Student protests and threats to speakers are not a new thing. There were student strikes at the universities of Oxford and Paris in the thirteenth century. Martin Luther, arriving in Leipzig to debate John Eck in 1519, surrounded himself with an armed cortège of Wittenberg students, anticipating trouble (or perhaps hoping to precipitate such) with the locals. Nineteenth-century Russia witnessed a surge in student radicalism. Dostoevsky’s The Devils provides a literary portrait of such, and the close connection between the term “intelligentsia” and revolutionary politics reflects this period. 1968 was not so much a novelty as a particularly intense example of a tradition. What Judge Duncan experienced at Stanford, while disgusting, is no innovation.
Yet protests do not always need to be obnoxious, like the one at Stanford. Some weeks ago I was myself subject to a protest while speaking at another college. The protesters, upset at my views on LGBT and Pride issues, organized opposition to my presence. But this group was different from the Stanford mob. My protesters attended my lecture, listened politely and even laughed at my jokes, asked some good questions, and then at the end left the lecture theater to hold a gathering elsewhere on campus. At no point did I feel disrespected as a human being. Far from it.
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